Even after months of working with Poser I still find its organization of content one of the most bizarre and unnecessarily difficult things to get my head around that I have ever seen, e.g., just try finding any hair in the "Hair" library. But, OK, I'm learning to deal with it.

One thing that continues to puzzle me, however, is that most MAT's are placed in the "Pose" library. For a model, at least, a MAT is basically a skin that wraps around the figure, right? I suppose it has to follow the poses, but it's not a pose in any sense that I can tell. And there is a "Materials" library that seems the obvious place for MATs.

So what's up with MAT's ending up in the "Pose" library?

thats a Fluke of Poser thats being used a lot becuase its a easy way of using materials sets.

older Poser version didnot had a good material system ..so thats why Pose mat was used for it ..

Chris

Material collections are realtively new, and while they are meant to replace the old mat poses, there are thousands of legacy poser products that still work fine, using the old system. And many users, are used to that older system, which has been around for 10 years or so.

Its the same with hair... dynamic hair is relatively new and is now available, but a hair prop can actually be a prop, a smart prop, or a conforming figure (As well as dynamic hair). It depend on the application.. some hair products work best as one of the alternatives.

Its far better to have more options then to be limited to only one possibility.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it has something to do with times before Poser 6, which included material collections. Before that you had to manually apply the material to each zone with the mt5 collections..   So instead, pose files were used that applied the materials to all the zones on the figure/object. 

So if you want a product to be compatible with any poser version below 6 and be able to apply multiple materials, matposes is the way to go. 

I don't know of any other advantages with matposes over poser 6 mat collections?

Also when it comes to finding things, I started very early to make my own structure rather than using the default folders which uses naming conventions that vary between the different vendors..   So I manually copy each folder from the downloaded/purchased zipfile into wherever I want it into my poser runtime. 

Like for poses, there are material poses, hair material poses, "normal" poses, poses that affect magnets or morphs etc. I've given all those separate subfolders to begin with, so if I'm looking for a matpose for a hair, I don't look under the vendor name first, but under the "Hairs" folder under the poses folder, and so on. 

Takes some time to organize at first, but it's worth it especially when your runtime grows big!

The downside to using pose files to apply materials is that there is no sanity check to see if the materials in the pose match materials in the figure, and if you apply them to the wrong figure then you end up writing garbage into the figure.  This doesn't matter if you aren't re-saving your figure, but if you are, the junk stays in the CR2 until you take it out again with a third party tool (for most people, this is a text editor and a lot of difficult editing).  In P8 and later you don't even have to go into the Materials Room any more, so really MAT poses are obsolete.  I don't bother to include them in any products I do any more.

The pose library is a set of instructions on changing the figures positioning. People found that it could also change the materials. They can also, load or remove morphs, or set the values of morphs. So you have Poses for position, poses for setting morphs, poses for installing/removing morphs and poses for materials and combinations of those.

It helps if you understand that all the files in poser are basically subsets of the scene file.  Hair is often a conforming figure and so a lot of hairs wind up in the character(figure) library. You can move them into the hair library if you want.

You may have found the face and hand libraries. Those are often found in the pose library as well.

The material library is the newest way of storing and applying materials and will gradually replace mat poses. You also have 'mor' poses which apply morphs

It would be nice if everything was better organised but its not so you learn to deal.

Quote - I don't know of any other advantages with matposes over poser 6 mat collections?

I suppose there are some useful applications like hiding/showing body parts of a figure or assigning existing parameter dials to control different aspects of a material, but I doubt more than 1% of Poser users would ever want to do anything like that with a MAT pose.

"One thing that continues to puzzle me, however, is that most MAT's are placed in the "Pose" library?"

iirc Mat files were not "discovered" by the Poser developers, but by a enterprising Poser user who just thought them up on their own! Right ?

If you have Poser 8 (not sure about pro) you can have your poser files or any files for that matter in any library section you like..

I have sub folders in my character section for clothing and inside each clothing file i also add the pose files in their own sub folder, makes life much easier lol

There is a great discussion of this issue over at the PzDb website.

The addition of methodology by users that was never conceived of by the program authors coupled with the total lack of standards for file naming has resulted in a Poser runtime where the naming and location of all content is basically RANDOM! It's not that the Poser Library is lame. Especially since the latest rewrite, which is quite an advance. The problem is, in the native library, there is nothing that ties all the pieces together. Collections is an attempt, but it's sure tedious to do. That's why I went with PzDb's database approach. 

Quote - "One thing that continues to puzzle me, however, is that most MAT's are placed in the "Pose" library?"

iirc Mat files were not "discovered" by the Poser developers, but by a enterprising Poser user who just thought them up on their own! Right ?

IIRC, that's right.  Just like transmapped hair, which was - again IIRC - discovered by Koz.

In terms of MAT poses, what it boils down to is, there are only two types of Poser file:

Those which load geometry

Those which modify geometry in some way

Since poses belong to the "modify geometry" category, they are ideal for this kind of thing.  Then again, so are the Camera, Face, Hand libraries.  In fact, several vendors used to put their MAT poses in Camera.  There's a slight peculiarity with Hand in that only one hand would work properly as a MAT (I think it was the Left).

Back in the good old P4 days, it was common to have the entire category swamped with MAT poses and, due to the good old 256 list limit, ones at the end would disappear.  There wasn't even the facility for extra Runtimes, either.  That was dreamed up by Hogfather with his PBooost utility.

It's like someone discovering that toothpaste could be used to clean silverware. You find toothpaste in the kitchen cabinet and it looks weird but there's a reason :-)

Well, OK. It looks like Poser's content management disorganization is more of an artifact of third party developers than it is an actual plan drawn up by Poser's developers. That's good.

I've only used Poser since version 8, so all of its history was unknown to me. So if I understand correctly, the whole "Materials" library is relatively new (since version 6?), and over time will probably replace the Mat poses.

Quote - I don't know of any other advantages with matposes over poser 6 mat collections?

Well, from a usability standpoint it's probably a major issue. I wonder how many potential users have abandoned Poser because one of the fundamental facets of the interface was incomprehensible.

Quote - In terms of MAT poses, what it boils down to is, there are only two types of Poser file: Those which load geometry

Those which modify geometry in some way

So files that load geometries would be characters (cr2) and props (pp2). All others modify geometry, right?

And thanks, basicwiz, for the PzDb idea.

Quote - Just like transmapped hair, which was - again IIRC - discovered by Koz.

I think it was Allerleirauh who first brought trans-mapped hair to the community, when she applied the technique to the poseable long curls hair for P4.  Kozaburo began releasing custom-modeled trans-mapped hair not long after.  I think the basic technique was supposedly already prevalent in 3DCG outside the Poser community when Allie introduced it.

Quote - So files that load geometries would be characters (cr2) and props (pp2). All others modify geometry, right?

a PZ2 will add (or inject) geometry as morphs.  You can also have any file type read a script to do things other than it's primary use.

"Well, from a usability standpoint it's probably a major issue. I wonder how many potential users have abandoned Poser because one of the fundamental facets of the interface was incomprehensible."

I look at it like oil painting.. there are people who think it should be done only ONE way. But the beauty of the medium is that it can be done many different ways.

Its the same thing with poser.. you COULD be locked into very limited encoded content, but instead, it can be done many different ways, and used and modified many different ways.

So... can you rename your old mat files from pz2 or such to the extension of the new materials library or do you have to load the material settings and then save them out?

Just change the extension of the MAT poses from pz2 to mc6 (and move them to the material library if you're using Poser 6/7).

OH.... so EASY!  giddily runs off to throw all her MAT files into the nice new toy box

Quote - If you have Poser 8 (not sure about pro) you can have your poser files or any files for that matter in any library section you like..

I have sub folders in my character section for clothing and inside each clothing file i also add the pose files in their own sub folder, makes life much easier lol

Took the words out of my mouth, Deni. Whilst the Poser file system can seem a bit bizarre, it's really not rocket science, and you can re-arrange things to suit your sense of organisation. And it only takes an extra 2 minutes to move things into your designated folders after installing ( which in Poser mean unzipping and copying the runtime over top of your target runtime ).

In the Character folder, I have people like the Daz figures and others arranged under People, all clothing in Clothing with sub-folders (like lingerie and shoes and outfits and costumes) and so forth.

Same for the Pose folder. morph tools like Corvas's armpit fix in Morphs, all actual figure poses in All Poses, clothing MATs in Clothing, Hair MATs in Hair, and ... well ... I sort-of put figure morphs in a folder called V4 Characters, which I know makes little sense to anyone, but it makes sense to me, which is what counts.

Point is: once you set things up to suit yourself, it will all make sense to you (if not to anyone else: doesn't matter, does it?).

For products I make, I even have a TestRT (test runtime) which gets re-made and deleted/replaced for each product I make/test. That one I try to leave folder naming as conventional as possible so that people find stuff easily after installing.

Mwah Robyn ;)